Conference Workshops

Conference Workshops – Friday, May 10, 2019

Session 1: 10:45am – 12pm

Workshop

Room

Awakening the Power of ELD Students and Families through Relationships and Advocacy

How do we build positive relationships among and between young people and adults? How can these relationships build community and create power for students and families? In this workshop we will cover how engaging youth and families, becomes a powerful tool for creating equity and building a positive school climate. We will highlight the importance of understanding school policies and the challenges young people and families face in their efforts to navigate the system so we can understand why change is so difficult, but also possible. We will share what we’ve learned about the importance of empowering marginalized communities so that they can drive powerful changes in our schools.

Lucero Garcia, MSW PPSC, School Social Worker, James Morehouse Project El Cerrito High School

The appropriate sharing of information between educational and school health partners is essential, both to effectively serve students and families and to ensure legal compliance. What are HIPAA and FERPA and how do they apply to your work? When and how may schools share information with their health partners, and vice versa? How can parents, schools, and providers share information to improve health and educational outcomes? This presentation will use case studies to understand and apply major confidentiality laws to common questions. Participants also will have an opportunity to share questions they would like to see addressed in new information-sharing resource being developed by CSBHA and WestEd.

Are you committed to preventing unintended pregnancies among your school-based health center clients? Learn how school-based health centers in Oakland, CA implemented an effective approach to provider training for Long-Acting Reversible Contraceptives (LARCs). Workshop participants will learn about a process for provider skill building and increased comfort with LARCs. Health care providers and SBHC administrators will be able to identify strategies for implementing LARCs and LARC education at their SBHCs.

Addressing the scaling up of mental health and suicide prevention efforts as part of a comprehensive Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS), this presentation will provide tools, resources, and strategies that infuse mental wellness efforts into the Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) framework.

Mindfulness has gained widespread and mainstream popularity over the recent decades. A slew of research has supported its efficacy with a number of diverse populations. One population however that hasn’t been given as much attention in the mindfulness field are youth impacted by trauma. Those impacted by trauma have distinct experiences and symptoms that may contraindicate certain mindfulness practices and should be approached via a trauma-informed lens. This lecture will overview the practice of mindfulness and how it can be applied to working youth impacted by trauma and present specific mindfulness strategies/interventions that can be taught via a trauma-informed perspective.

With the hiring of a new state dental director and the development of a new state oral health plan, there is
a renewed interest among oral health stakeholders in California to ensure that school districts and school-
based health centers are consistently participating in oral health programming. This panel of experts will
provide an overview of the current oral health best practices, funding mechanisms and strategies being
explored to increase and institutionalize participation among school districts statewide.

In 2011, the City of San Pablo passed a resolution to transform all of its schools into Community Schools. As part of it’s implementation process, the Beacon Community Schools Initiative leads with establishing Health and Wellness Services as it’s foundation. Participants will learn about San Pablo’s journey in using data to help inform it’s funding strategies as well as leveraging resources to suppor the Health and Wellness needs of the children, youth and families in San Pablo.

Stephanie Hochman, Director of East Bay Programs, Bay Area Community Resources

Bertha Romo, Youth, School and Community Partnerships Grant Manager, City of San Pablo

Data helps school based health centers to target services and tell their stories, but analysis can be intimidating and frustrating. Dabbling in the Data provides 15 interactive activities that organizations can use internally or with partners to make meaning of their data… without falling asleep! In this skill-building session, participants will learn how to learn from their data, yielding actionable insights and powerful stories. After practicing activities, attendees will reflect on how the activities might be used in their own organizations.

Corey Newhouse, MPP, Founder & Principal, Public Public

Kamilos

Session 2: 1:15pm – 2:30pm

Since the California Healthy Youth Act went into effect in 2016, California public schools are required to teach complete, science-based, and inclusive sex education at least once in middle school and once in high school. Join us for a workshop about how school-based health advocates can leverage the law to ensure their districts are creating linkages to care relating to reproductive health and healthy relationships. Participants will learn about how the law has been implemented to-date and gain strategies and tools to take back to their own schools.

Healthy Mind, Healthy Future: Identifying the Mental Health Needs of Children and Youth in Immigrant Families

The Healthy Mind, Healthy Future project set out to discover how current exclusionary immigration policies and anti-immigrant rhetoric are affecting the mental health of California’s children in immigrant families. In a time when DACA and TPS are threatened, find out how students are coping with an uncertain future, and what schools can do to help.

Adriana Ramos, MPH, Policy Associate, The Children’s Partnership

Hendricks

“The Butterfly Effect” of YAB Forum Theatres

The YAB is a group of peer health educators from Balboa HS in San Francisco. Over the years, they have designed and performed Forum Theatres as a strategy for community engagement and action on a variety of mental health issues affecting youth. Join us as we demonstrate our Forum Theatre in this interactive and fun workshop!

Structural racism in schools creates harm for students of color—especially black and brown young men. Their resistance is read as “behavior problems;” they are labeled “angry,” “defiant” or “under-achieving.” Efforts both to discipline and support these young people focus interventions on individuals (e.g. suspension, anger management classes). Scant attention is paid to the ways that adult school staff participate in structural racism and harm the young people we pledge to serve. This workshop highlights one effort to enlist teachers in the struggle to transform our schools to more effectively love, teach and reach our students of color.

Jenn Rader, Director, James Morehouse Project El Cerrito High School

Carr

Trauma-Informed Screening, Interventions, and Best Practices in School Based Settings

With a panel of experts, this workshop will review trauma screening tools currently in use in school based health centers, the results of a recent validation study conducted in middle schools, and the advantages and disadvantages of screening for trauma symptoms versus trauma exposure. Strategies for classroom and clinic screenings will be discussed. Exploration and follow-up for positive screens will be addressed.

A Beautiful Mind: Working with Youth with Psychosis and Other High Risk Mental Illness

Mental Health Clinicians at school health clinics in East and West Oakland will case studies, interventions and successes working with youth who present with psychosis, suicidal behaviors and other high risk mental health symptoms using culturally responsive, adolescent development and trauma informed evidence based practices.

California is home to the highest number of immigrants in the United States. Currently, almost half of California’s children live in immigrant families and 1 out of 5 California children has an unauthorized parent. Despite the fact that the majority of immigrants have legal authorization to live in the US, immigrants are under attack by the current president and his administration. Anti-immigrant threats and actions by the Trump administration cause increased levels of stress for immigrant youth, their families, and our communities. School based health centers have a responsibility and opportunity to respond to this crisis in ways that support our patients, affirm resiliency, and connect families with support. Staff from La Clinica’s SBHCs will share their experience creating safe physical and emotional spaces that are welcoming for immigrant students. The workshop will include clinical services, youth outreach, family engagement, and staff training strategies that strengthen a SBHC’s ability to care for our immigrant communities.

Creating sustainable, comprehensive school mental health programs is far from easy and made even more difficult by all the various available funding streams. Learn about the many different federal, state, and local funding sources that can be braided together to create full continuums of mental health services in schools. This workshop will help school-based health centers, schools, county mental health partners, and advocates understand the various streams of public funding available for mental health services in schools and equip participants with strategies on how to access funding streams. We will also unveil our brand new toolkit about school mental health funding.

Session 3: 3-4:15

This workshop will engage practitioners, educators, and researchers in exploring regional differences in adolescent romantic relationship characteristics, youth reflections on what they would like from programs including instruction on romantic relationships, and developmental neuroscience principles that can be used to help strengthen the application of relationships content in sexual health programming. Addressing romantic relationships embodies an adolescent development approach that is more holistic than focusing only on preventing sexually transmitted disease or pregnancy. Participants will have an opportunity for practical application by designing innovative strategies that can be incorporated into their programs.

Two major policy initiatives now include chronic absence as an accountability measure for schools in California, the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) and California’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF). This session will feature Attendance Works,the nation’s leading expert on chronic absence, California education policy leaders, and school health experts who will provide an overview of the accountability measures, how they can be used to reinforce the importance of health for attendance, and how school-based health providers can support efforts to address chronic absence.

Families are connected to both schools and communities, shouldn’t family supports be integrated too? In Alameda, we have forged a county-district-CBO partnership to create a family “hub” or central family resource center in one district. We will share our approach, focusing on the innovative partnerships and financing strategies that have made it possible.

Migrant students– whose families move across the state or country seeking seasonal or temporary work in the agricultural, dairy, fishery, or cannery industries—are among those most vulnerable for poor health outcomes. Learn about a new community-based project that is working to improve migrant students and their families’ understanding, access, and utilization of healthcare, specifically around oral health and nutrition. We’ll be sharing lessons learned from the project, and discuss how they can inform replication of this model in communities across California.

Self-care is Revolutionary – Creating a Culture of Wellness to Sustain Us

Audrey Lorde writes: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” As we navigate through stress, trauma, and political instability, our culture can sustain us in this protracted struggle of social change through SBHCs. How do we care for ourselves as we care for the children? How do we create an atmosphere of wellness in the workplace that honors all of our authentic experiences and cultural values? What practical strategies can we use today to support each other? Let’s co-create a culture of wellness and self-care in this interactive workshop.

Project Cal-Well is a five-year initiative led by the California Department of Education, in partnership with ABC Unified, Garden Grove Unified, and San Diego County Office of Education. Project Cal-Well’s mission is to increase awareness of and improve mental health and wellness of California’s K–12 students. This workshop will describe how schools can replicate Project Cal-Well’s three-tier approach to improve school climate, increase access to school-based mental health services, and build community partnerships. The University of California, San Francisco’s project evaluation will also be described, including how data can be used to track progress toward improving students’ mental health.

This workshop will describe how school health professionals can promote healthy relationships on school campuses through comprehensive strategies that address teen dating and sexual violence awareness and prevention. The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) will highlight best practices, preliminary outcomes, and lessons learned from three state-sponsored projects: a Comprehensive School-Based Teen Dating Violence Prevention Program (TV Program), a Multi-Level Strategy for Sexual Harassment Prevention (SH Prevention), and Youth-Led Community Mobilization. These programs move beyond teaching classroom curricula to change school climate through youth leadership, school administration training, school policy, campaigns, and community partnerships to promote healthy relationships.

Jeannine Barbato, MPH, Program Coordinator, California Department of Public Health

Enrica Bertoldo, MA, Program Coordinator, California Department of Public Health

Mina White, MPH, Research Scientist, California Department of Public Health

National studies have demonstrated that LGBTQ adolescents are disproportionately impacted by negative health outcomes including STDs, HIV, and unplanned pregnancy. In 2014, Essential Access Health surveyed LAUSD school-based Wellness Centers; gaps in current knowledge and practice related to inclusive clinical care of LGBTQ patients were identified. In 2016, we implemented staff trainings to improve LGBTQ-inclusive services. Based on training evaluation, areas for further technical assistance were identified, and used to develop online training resources. This presentation will discuss tools and best practices for implementing trainings on inclusive care.